The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

Limits of social media activism

It a recent training for some student journalists in Lagos, award-winning journalist Tolu Ogunlesi wondered how journalism was practiced in the pre-internet period. His question was informed by the ease with which writers now source for information and share their thoughts through various digital platforms.

I shared with him and the participants how journalists had to go to libraries to check old newspaper cuttings for background information, dictate stories word for word when analogue telephones failed to go through and be at the mercy of few local prints and broadcast organisations.

Thanks to technology, communication is now done with much ease with various platforms available to share information at a click to a global audience.

Unfortunately, the unrestrained freedom to communicate is being abused with some ‘citizen journalists’ sharing false information and sometimes indulging in baseless criticism.

Much as there was genuine cause for concern over the section of the proposed bill on electronic fraud that stipulated a seven-year jail term for who intentionally publishes slanderous messages about government electronically, it cannot be totally faulted based on what the electronic space has become.

What it sought to punish before it was deleted following public outcry was “anyone who intentionally propagates false information that could threaten the security of the country or capable of inciting the general public against the government through electronic message shall be guilty of an offence.”

I agree that the law could be misused by intolerant government officials, but a situation where some people under the cover of freedom of expression resort to misinforming the public through sharing of false information that can threaten the security and peace of the country is not tenable.

The electronic platforms have become a haven for all manners of writers who have the least regard for the right of the person they are writing on to fair hearing. Unsubstantiated allegations against government officials and others are widely circulated with malicious intentions.

While people should be free to hold the government accountable through alternative media like the online platforms, it should be done within the limits of the law and code of conduct for journalists.

We don’t have to like government officials, but in the words of Charles Prestwich Scot, facts are supposed to be sacred and comments free.

Social media writers can afford to rejoice over the deletion of the controversial section of the bill but they have to realise the need to exercise the freedom to publish with due sense of responsibility.

For public officers who have been used to being reported by the traditional media only, they have to come to terms with the new reality of multiple options to beam the searchlight on their activities.

More than ever before, government activities will come under intense scrutiny and appointees should be ready to speak up when necessary instead of getting unnecessarily agitated over some criticisms.

January 5, 2014
Another season of homilies and resolutions

One New Year resolution expected from politicians, particularly those at the federal level, is public affirmation of total commitment to free and fair election in 2015

This is the season for private citizens and public officials to make resolutions about how to choose new paths of improvement in what they do. Just as expected, our political leaders have seized the opportunity of Christmas and the coming of 2014 to do what they know how to do best: make promises; sermonise about how to make Nigeria work for all; and even pontificate about matters that are naturally beyond their ken. The goal of politicians’ sermons and New Year resolutions is generally to assure citizens of the relevance of political office holders to the lives of citizens. What troubles the average observer is that Nigerian political leaders from the president down to local government chairmen never take the trouble to find out if citizens are impressed by their mendacious talks at every religious festival.

For example, when President Jonathan announced his resolution to give Nigerians at least 18 hours of electricity per day, he did not realise that most citizens could not turn on their televisions or radio to watch or listen to him, simply because of power outage. Citizens must have been wondering in darkness why the president had to make this promise, more so that the energy sector had been successfully privatised by his administration. Ordinarily, people would now expect to hear from the new owners of the electricity supply chain, most of whom have been silent since they took over from PHCN. The federal government should give all the assurances of help at its disposal to the new electricity companies, not to citizens who have in the last six years have had to live with unredeemed promises about moving electricity supply from 2,500 megawatts to 5,000, and later to 6,000 megawatts.

In another part of his Christmas message, President Jonathan (perhaps unwittingly) made negative comments about the nation’s diversity, which for decades, leaders and citizens have passionately believed to be a fertile source of greatness for the country: “It remains my sincere belief that no height of human accomplishment is beyond us as a nation, if we can overcome our differences, such as they are, and forge a binding consensus to put the progress and well-being of the country above all other considerations.” I am sure the president knows that our cultural differences are not handicaps. What we need to do, as we prepare for a national conference to discuss how to make our country do better than it has done since 1966, is not to see our differences as obstacles to overcome but as realities to understand. Therefore, delegates to the national conference should not be encouraged to go and sit down and work out how to overcome our differences, but how to understand them and use the country’s diversity to improve the country’s performance and competitiveness within the comity of nations.

With the president’s announcement of his commitment to encourage Nigerians at the proposed national conference to contribute to how to make Nigeria peaceful and great, it is a good time to add that there is more to a national conference than talking about how to make a nation great. It requires talking and agreeing on how to make justice in all forms an abiding aspect of public and private life in a country. The presence of justice in every society and polity is the source of peace, harmony, and greatness. Those who have been calling for a national conference for decades have been concerned about justice to all sections of the country as the best way to make every part of the country feel confident to make the most sacrifice towards achieving the country’s progress and greatness. Such advocates recognise the country’s diversity, believe that the diversity is a source of greatness, particularly if the diversity is managed with a sense of justice by all concerned. Governor Kayode Fayemi’s New Year message to people of Ekiti State captures this view well: “I urge us all as a people whose destiny is connected inextricably with our great country to keep praying as we support the agitation for the restoration of true federalism and the entrenchment of equity and justice in our polity.”

One New Year resolution expected from politicians, particularly those at the federal level, is public affirmation of total commitment to free and fair election in 2015. On the part of partisan politicians, there should be an expression of commitment to a violence-free election at all levels, such as we just witnessed in Yobe, despite the state of emergency in that state. On the part of the country’s independent electoral commission, the agency needs to assure citizens at the beginning of a new year that all elections in 2014 and 2015 will avoid all the problems that marred the recent Anambra gubernatorial election. INEC must, as a body that is expected to be an impartial umpire, accept that excuses for not getting any aspect of polling right reflects sadly on the commission, erodes voters’ confidence in the electoral process, and can lead to serious democratic deficits capable of creating legitimacy problems for post-election governance. In addition to President Jonathan’s resolution to organise a credible national conference, INEC is the second most important agency in the country to assure citizens that it will do everything possible to gain the confidence of citizens in all elections the agency will conduct in 2014, as a way of making the right preparation for the 2015 national elections. Citizens need to be assured that elections will be transparent, efficient, free, and fair at all times in 2014, as this is one way to enhance peace, harmony, and unity in the country.

As universal (and sometimes instructive) as New Year resolutions are, Nigerians know that the president and most governors are entering in 2014 their lame-duck phase. Consequently, citizens are not going to take many of the promises made by federal and state executives with much seriousness, given the fact that a lame-duck year is not the best time to fulfill promises that could not be fulfilled in the preceding three years of full governing authority. What is likely to attract citizens’ attention and belief is for the federal government and its agency, INEC, to resolve to do a thorough job in organising a credible national conference in 2014 and credible elections in 2015 and beyond.

January 5, 2014
Are Jonathan and PDP now liabilities for tolerable impunities of elite misrule? (2)

n this concluding piece in a series that began in this column last week, perhaps I should start by admitting that the idea of tolerable impunities of elite misrule is a pessimistic, despairingly ironic notion. For ordinarily, there should never be talk of a “tolerable” or benign form of impunity in the misgovernment of any nation, any region of our world. This is because impunity of bad or mediocre elite governance is “tolerable” only to the rulers and even then only to that segment of the ruling class that occupies the seat of power, incumbency and patronage. For the overwhelming majority of the population, impunity of misrule is extremely intolerable. This is because it exerts a terrible toll on the lives of millions of the citizenry of any country whose unhappy fate it is to be subjected to such form of misrule.

In our country, we are only too familiar with the lineaments of impunities of misgovernment. The underlying structural feature is the fact that a very tiny fraction of the populace lives in untold, squandered and unproductive wealth while the great majority live below the absolute poverty line. Consequently and more alarmingly, millions of our peoples have greatly inadequate access to the amenities and benefits of modern, civilized and dignified existence. The list of such basic aspects of life in modern societies of the world that we sorely lack in our country is well known: potable and drinkable water for the vast majority of the populace; regular generation and distribution of electricity, as much in the cities and towns as in the rural communities; hospitals and health clinics that are clean, serviceable and actually do save lives; roads and highways in a nation-wide or territorial transportation grid in which travel is relatively safe, comfortable and free of imaginable and unimaginable hazards; security of life, properties and personal possessions; ever-widening expansion of communities of enlightened, progressive and civic-minded people adequately attuned to both the challenges and the opportunities of life in the 21st century of the Common Era.

As if the profile above is not bad enough, impunity of elite misgovernment also traps any people unlucky to be so misruled into becoming either willing or unwitting accomplices in their own subjection as the values, the practices and the norms of the rulers become those of the ruled as well. The corruption, the rot, the dog-eat-dog heartlessness of the political class is reproduced prodigiously in the populace. And it may come to be, heaven help us, that for the younger generations, this is all that they know of their country as knowledge of times when things were different becomes increasingly erased until it dies out with the last set of those old enough to have known relatively better and more humane times. No compatriots, “tolerable” impunities of elite misrule is a barbarous notion, a contradiction in terms, a sardonic yielding of discursive and ethical ground to a form of misrule that should never be accorded even the slightest space of legitimacy, talk less of sovereignty.

These opening observations and thoughts are further clarified by the fact that even the perpetrators of impunities of elite misrule never admit to being rulers of this kind. With the possible exception of the Nazis and the openly fascist, right-wing dictators of South America in intermittent periods throughout the 20th century, no governments, no ruling class parties in modern political history have ever admitted to being perpetrators of “tolerable” or benign forms of impunity of misrule. This is partly because it is extremely dangerous to the perpetuation of this kind of misrule to admit openly and cynically to its peculiar form of governance. For any government, any regime of military or civilian governance to do so would be to admit that it is undemocratic and therefore itself liable to being undemocratically removed from office or power. Moreover, to admit that a political order or a governmental administration is a “tolerable” form of misrule is to raise the risky, dangerous question of “tolerable” for or to whom? For surely, unless one has a very low opinion of human beings and their capacity for good, just and humane governance, one must necessarily accept the fact that impunity of elite misrule cannot be “tolerable” for the vast majority of those condemned to suffer or put up with it. As a matter of fact, for our purposes in this series, this is the bottom line, the discursive or investigative fundament: for whom, for which groups and classes of Nigerians, have impunities of elite misgovernment since the return to “democracy” in 1999 been “tolerable”?

Compatriots, in responding to this all-important question, I now intend to leave all abstract and speculative issues aside and address the question very concretely, very pointedly. This I wish to do by returning to the questions with which I concluded the discussion in last week’s piece. Let me remind the reader of the questions. From the time when Jonathan became Acting President in 2010, unprecedented sums have disappeared from the national treasury and the nation’s savings account, the Excess Crude Account: where did all this money go? Why, in spite of this – or precisely because of it – is the PDP fast breaking up and disappearing as the ruling party that was destined, as the boast went, to rule Nigeria for the foreseeable future in this 21st century? And what connection does all this have to the probability of the end of “tolerable” forms of elite misgovernment as the APC positions itself to become the new, post-PDP ruling party?

The roiling fragmentation of the ruling party into two factions, the PDP and the New-PDP, together with mass defections into the APC are not taking place because corruption, waste and squandermania have become too big, too unprecedented in its scale and therefore too unsustainable – which of course is the case. The basic cause of the unfolding implosion of the ruling party and the defections into the APC is the question of whether the Presidency will remain after the 2015 elections with Jonathan, the first “Minority” civilian Head of State in the country’s political history or go to a candidate from the North, most likely from the so-called “core” North. The oil subsidy mega-scam of 2011 in which 2.58 trillion naira – which is two and half times the annual budget for the whole country – was blatantly misappropriated was used primarily to fund Jonathan’s election in 2011. It has neither drawn sustained criticism nor has it afforded much ideological and moral firepower to the other political parties. Ditto with the 21 billion dollars that was the balance in the nation’s savings account, the ECA, when Jonathan became Acting President in 2010; in less than four years, it has dwindled massively to well below 2 billion dollars without any accounting provided to explain the disappearance of such a vast sum from our national coffers. But it too has neither been the target of principled and unrelenting criticism by the other parties nor the cause of the mass defections from the PDP to the APC.

I do not mean to suggest that the extraordinary levels of corruption, aimlessness and mediocrity in the Jonathan presidency is of no consequence in what is happening to and within the PDP now. For by even the abysmally low levels of performance in office of all the PDP federal administrations since the return to civilian “democracy” in 1999, the Jonathan presidency is extraordinarily mediocre and lackluster. However, even though this fact is being used vigorously and opportunistically by the other ruling class parties and especially the APC in their aspirations and efforts to dethrone the PDP as the ruling party in 2015, this is not the main reason why the PDP is imploding and is on the verge of ceding ground to the APC. The main reason is that Jonathan’s presidency and the PDP under his leadership have far exceeded the “tolerable” limits of elite misrule and all the ruling class parties and politicians are fearful that if the PDP is not stopped, they will all lose as the other ruling party – the army – steps in to “save” the country and the ruling class.

It remains for the other ruling class parties – and the APC especially – to demonstrate in theory and in practice, in ideology and policies, that their accession to power will be more than a mere reconfiguration of the PDP into new power blocs and alliances that will restore governance in our country to “tolerable” forms of impunities of elite misgovernment. If this does not happen, it will be business as usual, with only a few cosmetic changes to legitimize the new status quo. In such a reconstitution of the political order after 2015 in which we might say the king is dead but long live the king, nothing significant will change. The Southwest and the “core” North will still be the dominant power blocs in the country. The Presidency will still have the largest concentration of power, authority and patronage in any Head of State in the world. The Southeast will still feel permanently excluded from entitlement to producing an incumbent for our unreconstructed presidency. The Executive Governorships will still function basically as mini heads of state whose maintenance costs are financially crippling and morally deleterious for the country and the citizenry. And the people, the multitudes in every part of the country will still continue to endure the ravages of “tolerable” impunities of elite misrule.

This is not a forgone conclusion, an inevitable happenstance looming on the horizon of the present. But we need another series to explore this non-concluding conclusion on a note of hope, faith and optimism based on a firm and unshakeable belief in the capabilities of the masses of our peoples to take their destinies into their own hands.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

January 5, 2014
Have a great New Year!

This year, learn to take things in your stride with a good slice of humour

I see you made it into this New Year. Congratulations. I know you had no intention of missing this event but going by the myriads of problems we had confronting us last year, you must agree that for a minute there, there were doubts. We had so much to contend with during that year – national fiscal rascality, governmental roguery, epistolaric confrontations, a permanently disappointed populace, a near-disenchanted writer here (that’s me!). Add to that list insufficient housekeeping allowances given by husbands who whistle off-key, children more interested in their social network profiles than any school or career progress, and north Korea threatening to literally rain fire and brimstone on the world. Why, I bet even the Almighty himself was beginning to wonder why he thought the Garden of Eden needed a human to tend it. The animals would have done better than man is doing right now. What’s more; no animal would ever have thought of eating that blasted fruit.

In spite all that, the beat must go on; so, welcome to the New Year. I do not pretend to be a prophet. I restrict my prophetic utterances to the kitchen. For instance, when the powers have come on me, I have often found myself predicting to the head of the house that if money does not flow in the direction of the pots, there would be no food coming out of them within a day or two. The power of prophesy is such that it gets results, well, not always. For instance, when the children were young, I had often shouted my prediction that if they did not clean their rooms, there would be no supper. They had often looked up long enough to digest that information before going on with their task of causing more havoc. I had also forgotten that they did not want any food anyway and had had to be forced to eat. However, I will still take a good look into my crystal glass and make a prediction or two on this land.

I think I can safely predict that Nigerians are in for a bumpier ride this year. For example, look at the level of the nonchalance of our aviation minister to public censure against the strange purchases of armoured vehicles by her ministry, and the indifference of her boss to the entire matter. Perhaps, it could be that her boss has remained mum over the matter because he is also planning to buy yet another jet for the presidency, maybe one that can safely fly over the boko-haram territory. Anyway, even as we speak, we are told that the good lady is planning to purchase more vehicles. Actually, when I heard that, I did laugh a bit and wondered aloud if the woman was not going at it a bit strong. I mean, really, is the business of the ministry of aviation to purchase vehicles or to make planes fly more safely? Sorry, I’m stating the obvious. So, folks, we might need to buckle our seat belts; for this ride of governance is likely to have to dash through some more rough weather.

My crystal glass also tells me that as the nation’s two major political parties inch towards 2015, their measures would become more desperate and their tactics would become less subtle or refined, and either one would be more ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It would be true to say of them at that time that they could not care less. Reader, you and I must prepare to resist being thrown out by those who have no idea of how to bathe babies. I do not want to be like one of my students who once wrote that to be fore-warned is to be fore-harmed, I would rather say that we must arm ourselves to absorb or repel the year’s bumps.

First, let your armoury consist of quivers filled with endless arrows of humour. GEJ talks when he should not talk, and does not talk when he should? Just laugh it off. The man is probably missing home. It’s not easy to be away from the home you were born into and grew up in for close to eight years now; and goodness knows how many more if the nation succeeds in foisting the 2015 presidency on him. You know how it is with politicians. They never desire to serve; their people always desire them to serve.

APC and PDP dancing naked? Just laugh. I have always known APC to be a form of aspirin; and any aspirin must contain a little bit of alcohol so what do you expect? It’s PDP I have never been sure of. Does it sound like an insecticide, a pesticide or just a plain suicide giver? Anyhow, I think it stands for death and that is why they have systematically been killing the country since their train got into Aso Rock. I admit that is not very funny, but if you consider that all suicide missioners first kill themselves, I think you will see the funny side.

Is your police force going against the law? Just laugh and console yourself with the fact that your Nigeria Police has always been cross-eyed anyway. You know what happens to those ones, don’t you, I mean cross-eyed folks? When they are looking at evil, they see good; when they are looking at good, they see evil, and that’s exactly what is going on in the country. Not very funny, I guess, but if you remember that your police may ask you to arrest your own criminal and bring him/her in for questioning, you may see the funny side.

You also need to arm yourself with a large slice of love this year. Ah! But this is one thing that is sorely lacking in this country. For instance, have you taken a good look at your average Nigerian trader? When next you make a purchase, take a good look at the measuring tool or his/her eyes for that matter. Chances are that the tool is shorter than the law allows. Every single trader is doing it because no one can stop him/her. Well, that’s one reason. The other is that really, the buyer is nothing to them but a piece of money; this is why traders tend to have these vacant eyes. They do not see their clients or anyone else but lucre, filthy lucre. So, if you are a client reading this, I assure you that you are nothing more than money walking around in various forms of currency waiting to be plucked. When you are well dressed, you are the highest currency and they tell you ‘you look a million dollars’. When you are in your kitchen wears, however, you just ‘ain’t worth a dime’. Nevertheless, this year, learn to love your fellow Nigerians – trader, politician, police, GEJ, neighbour, thief, etc. – for love begets love, respect begets respect and, conversely, hatred begets hatred. We already have enough of that last one coming at us from the government, so don’t add to it.

Then, arm yourself with a very positive attitude this year. Just believe that in the end, all manner of things will be well. That is what I usually tell myself when things slide off the handle worse than a snail having a soapy bath. Let’s face it; you cannot help yourself, anymore than our aviation minister can help herself when it comes to buying cars; or GEJ from wanting to stay on in office or buying jets; or Obj. from writing letters or talking. They are things that happen to us, so we must take them in our stride with a good slice of humour. Just believe that we the people will laugh last because the country belongs to us, not to them. HAVE A GREAT NEW YEAR!

January 5, 2014
Missing link in Okoh’s homily

Anglican leader’s one-sided sermon

Deliberately, I have almost always refrained from taking on our religious leaders. But something stirred in me when, on Christmas Day, I watched the Archbishop of Abuja, The Most Rev. Nicholas Okoh, talk about some people who want to cause trouble in the country, only to travel out when there is a crisis. “Nigerians ought to be grateful to God and live responsibly. Do not join anybody to cause trouble. If we follow life diligently, Nigeria will blossom, your lives will blossom. Refugees are not the happiest of people, don’t make yourself a refugee”, he had said. President Goodluck Jonathan also delivered his own ‘sermon’, when one would have thought the only thing he should have been allowed to do was read the lesson at the service; that is even if he must. Are there no more Lay Readers in the church?

Be that as it may, the President turned the rare privilege of speaking at the service into a political soapbox. He ranted about the country belonging to some people and not to some other people. One did not need to be discerning to know who the tirades were aimed at. And the question that naturally arose from that was at what point did those people the President was referring to stop being the country’s true statesmen and patriots? Why did he not reject it when these same people were throwing him forward for the presidency, since he did not know them to be the owners of Nigeria?

Be that as it may, I revere the Anglican Communion and that is why I made up my mind to write now. Perhaps if the leadership of some of the ‘penterascal’ churches had said what Primate Okoh said, I would have ignored them because some of those ones have redefined the essence of the church, especially with the emphasis on prosperity, to the detriment of the ultimate, salvation.

But it is important to tell our religious leaders the home truth. The Most Rev Okoh, who is also the Primate of the Church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion, said the right thing when he talked about peace and the need for Nigerians to emulate Jesus Christ. But, whether knowingly or unintentionally he eventually entered into the realm of politics when he made the statement about people wanting to cause trouble in the country, only to fly out when the country begins to burn. I waited anxiously to see whether the Primate would balance his sermon by also cautioning the leadership on the need to govern responsibly. He never did; which was a big minus to whatever good intentions he might have had with the sermon. The crisis that the Most Rev Okoh was afraid of would always come, no matter the amount of sermonising. It is inevitable the way the country is drifting; one of the things that can avert it is for the religious leaders to also tell these political leaders nothing but the truth.

Even when the Primate asked the congregation how many of them had International Passport, I laughed because I am almost sure many of them do. That church is not one of those churches for the ‘wretched of the earth’. If the Primate comes down to some of the backwater Anglican churches, even his own followers would not say ‘Amen’ to whatever prayers he might have said when the emphasis is only on trouble makers, without saying a word about avoiding what could have triggered the trouble. Can there ever be peace when there is no justice? Thank God this is no longer the era when the priest would ask the congregation to ‘say after me’. That was the way of the catechists of old that only had the authority to speak authoritatively on the Bible then. Nowadays, the priest would say his own while the congregation would also say theirs because all, including the priest, have different ailments that they have brought before Christ. So, the question of saying after the priest does not arise.

My Lord Spiritual should ask people back in the village what life is like with them. Indeed, our religious leaders should do well to find time to visit the unknown quantities in their churches. Otherwise, they themselves will be blindfolded by the grandeur of power if they restrict themselves to the cocktail circuits of the high and mighty.

Primate Okoh must be familiar with some of the ugly developments in the country. The most recent being the case of the aviation minister, Stella Oduah, who is enmeshed in a N255million bullet-proof cars’ scandal. In which decent society does such a thing happen without the government taking a firm action against the culprit? Is the Primate aware too of the many promises the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Federal Government has made concerning power supply in the last 14 years? How far has the government kept to its promises? Now, the same President Jonathan who told us that this year, we would be throwing our generators away because we won’t have any need for them again has shifted the goal post. He has therefore budgeted close to one billion on generator-related matters for Aso Rock and federal ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs). It is good that Nigerians have learnt not to trust the government again; so, they have refused to act like the people who only saw the gathering storm and poured away the water in the house. Moreover, has the Primate bothered to ask why our economy is improving only on paper? Has he bothered to find out the cause of the Rivers State crisis, etc.? In saner climes, heads would have rolled over any of these sad developments, that is if the country itself is not on fire now.

I know many members of the Anglican Communion who are very displeased with the state of affairs in the country today. As a matter of fact, I also know of an Old Citizen of the church who says he dare not go to church any Sunday unless he has at least N30,000 handout to give to young and able-bodied men and ladies of the church who are roaming the streets years after graduation. In those days, it was the young ones who assisted the old financially. The person I am talking about is over 70 years old and he is the one who now has to fend for people that the country should have provided jobs for if there is a government properly so-called.

Our religious leaders should not shy away from speaking truth to power. These are the kinds of things they should be telling them, instead of delivering homilies that would give the leaders the impression that God is behind them, even when they are stealing the country blue. The contradictions in Nigeria, and especially under this administration, are mindboggling. It is true they did not start under the present government but then it has been the same PDP government all these years. But again, we would have been seeing signs of assurance if the present government has any clues to the country’s problems; but the changing is only getting worse.

It is gratifying to note, however, that Primate Okoh’s position contrasts sharply with that of the immediate past Prelate of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, The Most Rev Peter Akinola. Akinola, in his sermon at the interdenominational church service at the National Ecumenical Centre, Abuja, to commemorate the 2012 National Democracy Day, accused governments at all levels of allowing corruption to eat into the country’s socio-economic and political fabric, by paying lip service to the fight against the cankerworm.

That was only last year. Corruption has worsened in the country with the Jonathan government looking perpetually helpless as if it has covenanted with the affliction. The only people whose lives can blossom the way Nigeria is being run today are the crooks and treasury looters. Poverty and hunger have already made many Nigerians refugees even though we are not at war.

My Lord Spiritual, this is the home truth.

January 5, 2014
Southwest 2014 elections: Will President Jonathan allow history be his guide?

But whoever thinks these jejune tricks will result in successively rigging any of the coming elections in the Southwest must think again

Just in case our dear president does not know, or knows but has forgotten, the South-west, aka Wild, Wild West, has been the grave yard of many a federal government of Nigeria. It has serially posed questions, especially at elections, bordering on the very survival of this country as we saw in 1966, 1983 and ’93 and barely escaped asking same questions in ’03 and ’07 when, under President Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigerians witnessed the most rigged elections anywhere under the sun. This was no design of the West as its peoples, the Yoruba, did not sit down anywhere to plan mayhem. Rather they were a victim of what GBOGUN GBORO captured beautifully in his column in The Nation’s edition of Thursday, January 02, 2014.

We will quote him, mutatis mutandis, at some length.

In the article: YORUBA NATION: TIME TO STAND STRONG, he wrote: ‘We must also make it clear to Nigeria that we are now much more determined to uphold and show our rejection of electoral fraud – that heinous disease that has periodically brought disaster upon Nigeria since 1964. The source of this Nigerian disease is no more than those in control of the federal government who, since independence, assumed that it is their prerogative to dictate, through fraudulent means, the outcome of elections in any part of the country. In the context of this disruptive assumption, respective electoral commissions, electoral tribunals and Appeal courts, as well as the Nigeria Police – have usually operated like invading armies wherever the people show abhorrence to this fraud; Yoruba land being the foremost of such areas. The result is that thousands of our young men have needlessly been dispatched to their early graves as was the case in 1965 – 1966 when hundreds were killed by Nigerian law-enforcement agencies all over the Western Region. In Ondo State in 1983 when falsified results were announced by federal authorities in the gubernatorial election, scores of those who rose to resist the fraud were again mowed down by the police. Similar examples abound as in the rigged 2007 gubernatorial election in Osun State when tens piled up in the morgue for weeks. The lesson here is that the Yoruba, having been accustomed to choosing their own rulers for over a thousand years, are too culturally attached to free and fair elections to tolerate electoral fraud.’

In the full knowledge of this Yoruba resistance, our current tormentors have devised two ingenious ways of achieving the same result without noisily showing their hands: the first is to abandon their own party in the choice of a hireling as gubernatorial candidate; a practice recently condemned by former President Obasanjo. The ‘candidate’ is then maximally supported: money, tonnes of it –after all, some 10 billion dollars in oil money remain unaccounted for, police, soldiers, all. This, of course, is the second stage as much earlier, elements of the Electoral Commission, acting on orders from above, would have maliciously imported hundreds of thousands of fictitious names into the voters’ register. INEC then ensures there is no verification whatever, or allocates very insufficient time to the exercise.

In ‘THIS IS NO SCARE MONGERING’, Sunday, 3 November, 2013, I wrote as follows on this phenomenon: ‘A pattern of election rigging ahead of 2015 is emerging as any keen observer of recent elections in the country would readily affirm. And it is not by happenstance; rather, it is a well choreographed test run of what will be put into play in the 2014 elections in both Ekiti and Osun states. Of course, they will attempt the ‘Ondo template’ in Anambra where they will do everything to assist the candidate of Governor Peter Obi, the President’s good friend.

How perceptive!

In Anambra, where the voters’ register was heavily manipulated again, Professor Atahiru Jega, the INEC Chairman, personally undertook to ‘clean up’ the compromised register but, you believe that and you will believe anything. In the end, the election turned out worse than the Obasanjo elections.

But whoever thinks these jejune tricks will result in successively rigging any of the coming elections in the Southwest must think again. As in previous elections, we have over a thousand eagle eyes that will tear into INEC’s convoluted Voters’ registers to identify hurriedly imported, but fictitious names, just as a million soldiers cannot scare a determined people even in the unlikely event that the military high command succumbs to the army being used as ex-President Obasanjo already indicated in his letter to the President. We know there are enough men of honour in the Nigerian army to reject such evil plans even if, unfortunately, that cannot be said of a Nigeria Police that has largely become an armed wing of the ruling party. But they will meet the Yoruba doubly prepared for a government we know hates the majority of our people whilst eagerly romancing an insignificant minority. Apart from President Jonathan’s need for new friends, especially in an ‘electorally hostile’ geo-political zone like ours, we can never forget that he personally declared himself the overall campaign manager for the PDP candidate in the 2009 rerun election in Ekiti.

We are not unaware of the boast within PDP and its crony political parties in the state that the high command has charged them to do anything to rig Fayemi out of office following which the icing on the cake would be Mr President personally ensuring Aregbesola is equally rigged out. Talk we say, is cheap; but we warn and pray that those so minded would learn from our history, dating back to the Kiriji war and, especially, the fact that every wrong done to the Yoruba collective has brought down every offending government : Balewa’s, IBB’s, for instance.

The Yoruba will hate to be the leitmotif – the recurring theme -for a dismemberment of Nigeria but nobody should foolishly dare us. Governor Kayode Fayemi has very succinctly enunciated the Yoruba attitude to the coming elections. This he captured in his New Year message to his Ekiti compatriots when he said: ‘My dear honourable people of Ekiti, as you know, this year 2014 is a year of crucial decision in our State. Our still young republic grapples with the legacy of militarism, its violent imprint on our politics, and a generational perception of political competition as a form of warfare. It is unfortunate that politics is not widely seen as a contest of ideas for hearts and minds but a desperate means to get to power by all means possible. I take this opportunity to remind all and sundry, particularly those who would be interested in contesting the upcoming election, that the quality of power is defined by the nature of its pursuit. When we mortgage our consciences and values in the pursuit of power, no matter how dignified or admirable our intentions, it costs us bits of our humanity and deprives governance of the moral authority that is its true foundation. We should refrain from inciting our people to violence and other negative tendencies. Ultimately, an anarchic approach in which the contestants for power deploy all means, fair or foul, to win, de-legitimises and de-humanises politics. We cannot afford to lose the grounds we have gained in establishing peace and tranquility in Ekiti over the last few years’.

We can only hope that a word will be enough for the wise.

January 5, 2014
Jonathan and his Afenifere allies

In December 20, Governor Olusegun Mimiko led representatives of the Yoruba socio-cultural and political organisation, Afenifere, to visit President Goodluck Jonathan. The visit came some eight or so days after former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s venomous letter to Dr Jonathan was made public, and a few days before the president’s insipid reply was published. The president is under enormous pressure to opt out of the 2015 presidential race and to accept responsibility for what his critics describe as the unremitting dullness of his government. But he not only soldiers on valiantly, even if the opposition to his presidency increases and renders his hold on power tenuous, he also appears eager to clutch at any straw within his reach in order to give the impression things have not yet spiralled out of his control.

There are not many straws Dr Jonathan can clutch at in the near future, especially with the withering look he gets from the North, and the barely disguised contempt he attracts from the Southwest. But there is at least one straw he can clutch at gutsily outside the fawning regions of the South-South and Southeast where his canonisation remains unquestionable and irreversible: the Afenifere. The Afenifere, not the Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG), of course, is not only irredeemably splintered, as everyone knows, it is also neither as ideologically coherent and consistent as before nor as relevant as it used to be when the Southwest was buffeted by Gen Sani Abacha’s oppressive machines and Gen Abdulsalami Abubakar unfurled his presumptive transition programme.

Dr Jonathan is by all considerations out of favour. His arch supporters in the oil rivers have seemed to exhaust their ethnic jingoistic cries, and were in fact dealt a massive blow by Chief Obasanjo’s letter which described the Jonathan government as mindlessly and unconscionably mining the region’s ethnic sewers. Whatever raucous noise they make henceforth in those forbidden creeks will continue to weaken into hoary whispers of disjointed support. His supporters in the Southeast stand ramrod, but it is not altogether clear on what foundations the region’s brazen support for him stands, or that given an accentuation of the bolt from the national political stables begun by the All Progressives Congress (APC), the region would not be tempted to burn the barn. The amperage of Dr Jonathan’s support in those parts may still be burning high, but it has not stopped the president from despairing or from showing signs of paranoia.

The Afenifere has a rich and enviable history of enduring pain and rejection. Indeed, in its long and proud years of existence, it always preferred complete ostracism than any romance with the forces of reaction and conservatism. If by its associations today it has appeared to jettison its historical principles, that fact is explained both by the philosophical makeup of its current leaders, most of whom are ordinary pragmatists relying more on common sense than any deep introspection, and the circumstances of its bitter loss to regional political rivals, particularly the All Progressives Congress (APC). For whatever pretences it makes, the fact is that Afenifere is much more political than cultural, and more sneakily autocratic than Yoruba history richly demonstrates.

It was, therefore, not surprising that Dr Jonathan and the Afenifere were driven into each other’s arms, the former because of the rejection and humiliation he suffered at the hands of Nigerians appalled by his government’s lack of initiative and charisma, and the latter by their regional loss, flat-footedness and poor political manoeuvrability. Dr Jonathan’s desperation is not surprising, nor does anyone expect him to spurn any alliance, no matter how opportunistic. What is really earth-shaking is the ease with which the Afenifere jumped into bed with a government that has all but transformed into fascism. Sometime in October, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, an Afenifere chieftain, seemed to have set the stage for the Afenifere romance with the Jonathan government when he declared his support for the convocation of a national conference before the modalities had been stated. That support remains intact even after it became clear that what Dr Jonathan had in mind is not exactly what the true proponents of national conference have in mind.

In the interview Chief Adebanjo granted a newspaper in October, he went as far as suggesting that if need be the constitutional provision of periodic election should be subordinated to the conference, for, in his opinion, a conference was more exigent than an election or a constitutional provision. It was no use, he argued, to hold an election when the country had not been restructured, and the fear of conflict not dissipated. On the surface, he would appear to be making a logical presentation. However, not only did he fail to question the motives of Dr Jonathan who was obviously driven by pressure and circumstances into yielding to a measure he once roundly loathed, Chief Adebanjo kept talking of sovereign conference as if the president had decided on making the conference sovereign.

In any case, when the president eventually put his so-called conference ideas into words, he preferred to use the word ‘national dialogue’ rather than conference, let alone a sovereign conference. Neither Chief Adebanjo nor his colleagues in Afenifere were dissuaded by their past political failures in seeking for proof of government’s sincerity in policy enunciations. In 1998, they accepted to fully participate in Gen Abubakar’s transition programme even without the promulgation of a constitution, when they could have forced major changes in the constitution given the peculiar circumstances of the time. It is the same constitution that is now in focus. Before the 2003 elections, they also uncharacteristically embraced ethnic politics by throwing in their lot with Chief Obasanjo who was clearly the wrong choice for the presidency, not to talk of his questionable democratic credentials and poor policy conceptions. Now, barely a decade after those egregious blunders, the Afenifere leaders are embracing Dr Jonathan who has no grain of democracy or liberalism in him, cares nothing for the constitution he swore to defend, especially seeing that he prefers a monarchical form of government, and is merely using the dialogue to ventilate the pressures on his uninspiring government.

There are rules guiding the postponement of elections. In October, Chief Adebanjo discountenanced those rules and turned the constitution into a capricious document with flexible provisions and timelines. The Mimiko-led Afenifere took the extraordinary step of denouncing before the president those who questioned the convocation of a dialogue at this point, especially the decision of the president to forward the outcomes of the dialogue to the National Assembly for their deliberations. Femi Okurounmu, chairman of the committee tasked with working out the modalities for the conference, described the conference as a dialogue in at least one sentence during the presentation of his committee’s report to the president. While Afenifere’s support for Dr Jonathan is no longer in doubt, a support that is however antithetical to their history and credo, it is hoped that they and the Jonathan government will have settled whether to call the conference a conference or a dialogue before the talks begin. At least, it is already known that it won’t be sovereign.

The incurable optimists of the Afenifere see nothing wrong or alarming in embracing the agenda of the Jonathan government. If Dr Jonathan’s hidden agenda do not frighten them, perhaps because they are too hopeful to see the dangers of having a major conference in what appears to be an election year, they should at least be worried by their own transformation from a progressive and principled organisation of a majority of Yoruba people to a bitter, opportunistic and unthinking organisation of a minority of Yoruba people. They should be alarmed by how rapidly they have descended from the Olympian height of supporting democrats and charismatic leaders in office to wholeheartedly and unscrupulously embracing reactionary non-performers in office. And while they copiously quoted the sage, Obafemi Awolowo, in the presence of Dr Jonathan, it is hard to explain why they failed to hear how ludicrously they sounded when they flattered their host as an offshoot of Chief Awolowo’s First Republic campaign prediction.

But it was not unexpected that Governor Mimiko would lead the woolly hairs of the Afenifere to meet minds with the distressed and increasingly forlorn Dr Jonathan. Before his re-election, the Ondo State governor had been projected by the losing groups in the regional political sweepstakes of the Southwest as the counterpoise to the feisty iconoclasts of the APC. When he won, the bitter and unforgiving rivals of the APC concluded that Dr Mimiko would serve as the new core of Yoruba politics. Since he won, they have begun to practicalise their aspirations. It, however, does not occur to them that they are merely giving a contemporary feel to the cancer that relentlessly gnaws at the sinews of the Yoruba, a cancer that sees the losing group forming an alliance with the political and cultural antagonists of the Southwest. This cancer saw a bitter Afonja align with Oyo Empire enemies; and it saw a bitter and frustrated Ladoke Akintola align with northern hegemonic leaders against the Western Region. It is certainly not a mistake that the majority of south westerners are in the APC. The reasons can be located in the disruptive inclinations and influences of the Obasanjo presidency, the obnoxiousness of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which offended the civilisation and sensibilities of the Southwest, and the absolute ineptitude of those who govern the country so uninspiringly and so loathsomely from Abuja. Why the Afenifere thinks this movement is a fluke is hard to explain. Why the Labour Party (LP), which at the moment stands for nothing, hopes to make itself the rallying core for the Southwest is also hard to explain.

It is, however, evident that history is being replayed in the Southwest. When Afonja entered into an alliance with the Fulani against the empire he was appointed to defend, it was to spite his people whom he ended up betraying. When Chief Akintola forged an alliance with the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC), it was to underscore his grievances against Chief Awolowo and the Action Group (AG). Now that the same spirit has been awakened and blended in the alliance between Dr Mimiko and the Afenifere, the stage is set once more for a replay of the regions’ bitter and violent past. If history is a guide, however, not only will the opportunistic alliance fail, and its contraptions collapse, the end can be foreseen clearly in the failure of those who prefer to dine with the enemy because they hate the false dentition of their compatriots.

As they took pictures with Dr Jonathan in their starched agbadas, in addition to making sarcastic and caustic remarks about their Southwest compatriots, a diligent person must doubtless appreciate anew what it feels like to deaden the censorious pangs of conscience during the act of betrayal. For it would be too optimistic to suggest that the romantics of the rump Afenifere visited Aso Villa and met the president without the reproof of conscience that the ordinary man experiences on a daily basis in the process of telling a small lie or coveting a neighbour’s property.

December 29, 2013
Jonathan’s belated anti-venom makes split deeper

In former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s blistering letter to President Goodluck Jonathan, there was no hint of the statesman or of lofty ideas; no show of stately language or of decorum; and nothing of the logical coherence or philosophical exactitude expected from great leaders. Indeed, it was full of rebuke, of sanctimonious gibberish, of offensive display of superior airs, and remorseless grandstanding. In my consideration of the letter last week, I suggested that when Dr Jonathan’s reply would finally come, it would be as inaccurate and full of drivel as that of Chief Obasanjo, and perhaps more pedantic. I have not been disappointed. In Dr Jonathan’s reply, there was absolutely nothing elegant; not of language nor of ideas, not of indisputable facts nor of moderation and restraint. Indeed, in the letters, the two leaders were united by their common atrociousness, a vice that invariably pulls them apart. Like poles, scientists say, repel.

Chief Obasanjo wailed that Dr Jonathan had become intolerably lax in combatting corruption. The president had no response, for his treatment of the Stella Oduah matter stands as a refutation of any claims he might have to the contrary. Whatever other things he had to say on corruption was trivial and vexatious, especially his silence over what steps were proper for Nigeria under him to take on the Halliburton and Siemens scandals. There was also the nonsensical exchange on Buruji Kashamu, the businessman extraordinaire. It was baffling that Chief Obasanjo raised the matter at all; it was all the more baffling that Dr Jonathan deemed it merited a response. It was pure balderdash. In paragraph after paragraph, Dr Jonathan showed how he and Chief Obasanjo were much alike, though he argued his predecessor was worse.

Many of those who read the letters suggest that on account of the severity of language use and the expletives, the two gentlemen would find it difficult to be reconciled. It is pointless to hazard any guess as to whether peace can be made between the two, for they are both sufficiently pliable and devoid of shame and moral compass to be eternally inflexible. They may have injured each other bitterly, and have abused themselves heartily, but the lies they tell, and the indifference with which they tell them, illustrate their common abhorrence of lofty ideals. Men such as these don’t fight for ever.

But something else stands out in the letters. Chief Obasanjo’s is the more vigorous and memorable. In lying, his letter told memorable lies; and in self-praise it was more grandiloquent. Such talents are a testimony either to his military antecedents or his fundamental badness, or both. Dr Jonathan’s is the more timid and undistinguished. He didn’t lie as egregiously as Chief Obasanjo; he simply evaded the truth and buried himself in foul language. It reflected his distracted and servile mind. It is a shame both gentlemen ever rose to leadership position.

December 29, 2013
Elephant and Castle

(The political economy of royal succession)

Just in case you are thinking of the huge and sprawling shopping complex to the South east of metropolitan London, this is not about shopping. Or rather let us just say that this is about shopping for a president in a royal jungle. It is about the political economy of succession in an animal farm. All animals are equal, but some animals are truly more equal than others.

Sorry folks, we have to return to the feral and furry realm of animals once more. A few weeks back, we had thought that we were done with animal tales. But there are compelling reasons to return to the magic world of crawlies and good old Comrade Napoleon. This is what happens when the tools of conventional Political Science fail dismally to explain or grasp the dynamics of an unfurling political drama.

Conventional Political Science rests on a set of stable variables for its analytical validity and integrity. To a large extent, you can predict the outcome of the inevitable collision of human and social forces. After all, when you have eliminated all that is impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth, to appropriate the great Sherlock Holmes. But in the post-colonial jungle, nothing is set and everything is variable. It is the ultimate nightmare of the political scientist.

You would have thought that only a year after the last presidential election and given the dire and fraught situation of the country, a nasty succession battle would be the last thing on the mind of our political class. You would have thought that amidst country-wide social unrest and given the fact that the north of the nation has virtually imploded politically and economically from the Boko Haram scourge, presidential election would be the last thing on the mind of politicians.

You would have thought that the conventional wisdom is to fix what is broken first before deciding who should handle it. But you are profoundly mistaken. This is Nigeria, Blackman’s own country. And who would have thought that at this particular moment the Jonathan presidency would come to resemble the Yar’Adua presidency in its inert and futile probing like a stalled caterpillar and its mix of political and physiological ailments? It is all beyond our human ken. It points at some malignant tricks of some powerful occult forces.

If anybody had thought that the next presidential election or the impending succession battle would be fought over the Boko Haram plague or how to secure the political stability of the nation by redesigning its grand architecture, they had better perish the thought. A plantain plantation or Banana Republic does not require architectonic wonder. Just allow the oil to flow and all will be well.

It may be an economy based on extractive predation, but it is an economy all the same. After all there is demand and there is supply, which is the first law of economics. Secure the oil rig first and the electoral rigging can come later. This is the political economy of royal succession in an animal farm.

Last week, there were some significant moves on the chessboard which foreshadow a great battle of will and wits in the coming months. It points towards another epic succession battle. It is a play of giants and both the grass and the grassroots are already trembling. Against the selectorate, the electorate have no chance. The kingmakers only vote after the king has been chosen for them. This past week, the elephant rumbled and the castle quaked as if it has suffered a tectonic concussion. Let us return to the elephant and the castle.

With its mammoth brains, the elephant is gifted with phenomenal memory. It neither forgives nor forgets. Its powers of photographic recall are a tad short of the miraculous. It remembers human faces and scant topographic features. It stalks those who have attempted to harm it with chilling resolve. It often lies in wait for those who would ambush it. When roused to fury and indignation, the elephant is a truly formidable picture of elemental rage and umbrage, tearing at and pulling out everything in sight and out of sight. Its capacity for absorbing punishment is legendary and even in death—as the Yoruba will attest—the skull of an elephant is no luggage for children.

In anger and angst, not even the castle is safe and secure from the elephant, more so when the elephant itself has sojourned twice in the castle. A bid to secure permanent residency met with massive popular discontent in which the earth quaked with towering indignation and disgust. The elephant retreated in shame and misery. But it has not forgotten old business or forgiven old businessmen. In military parlance, it is known as discreet evacuation of troops while awaiting reinforcement.

Last week, Nigeria’s surviving pachyderm from the Jurassic Age, the irrepressible and inevitable General Olusegun Obasanjo, finally roused himself to political battle but from the economic trenches. With well-controlled indignation and in an act of political marksmanship quite stunning for a man of his advance age, Obasanjo took the economic policy of his political protégé to the cleaners. The proposed introduction of the 5,000 naira mega-bill, he averred, was not only going to further compound the economic miseries of Nigerians, it was bound to fuel massive inflation.

All hell was let loose at the castle. This was the political equivalent of Pearl Harbour when the Japanese suddenly overwhelmed the imperial might of America. You would have thought that as a distinguished member of the Council of States and Jonathan’s political benefactor and godfather, Obasanjo had a safe and secure communication channel, a hotline as they say, to communicate his misgivings to the presidency. But this is what late M.K.O Abiola famously described as “high-wire politics”.

A succession war is in full swing. The elephant has bared its battle-tested trunk. Knowing fully well that transformation is the kernel of Jonathan’s message and self-declared mission, and knowing fully well that a sound economic policy is the heart of transformation, the great elephant has wrapped its trunk around the presidency’s soft and septic underbelly.

This is a textbook military operation, a bold Panzer strike at the jugular before the mopping up operation. Once Jonathan is rendered combat-ineffective, it will be a question of time before his limping presidency is taken out of contention. Obasanjo is a past master of the politics of delegitimation. His artillery bombardment of Babangida’s “deficits of honour, credibility and integrity” prepared the ground for the Minna General’s crucial lapse of concentration and hurried exit from power.

The same gambit led to the eventual unraveling of Alhaji Shehu Shagari, General Mohamadu Buhari and lately the Yar’Adua presidency. In the particular case of Alhaji Shagari, Obasanjo gave a damning and devastating critique towards the end. When the Daily Times deliberately published a garbled and mischievous version, the irate general sent a blistering rejoinder. Abacha who could read the game very well swiftly impounded him, but this did not prevent the goggled one from meeting a similar fate.

For months, there have been rumours of a final and terminal parting of way between godfather and godson. It was deliberately leaked to the press that Obasanjo was eyeing a Sule Lamido/ Rotimi Amaechi ticket. This was swiftly and hurriedly denied. The stinging economic rebuke is the clearest indication so far that that the Jonathan administration is an object of stringent scrutiny by Nigeria’s power mafia and the report card may not be too flattering.

Predictably, the presidency has been placed at the equivalent of a war footing. Presidential canine sentries simply tore into Obasanjo. There were even echoes of Michael Okhai Akhigbe’s infamous put-down of the old warhorse as a frustrated farmer. Leading the pack of hounds is Doyin Okupe who ironically was Obasanjo’s former spokesperson. With patronizing glee, Okupe dismissed his former boss as a private citizen who is entitled to his own views. One can almost hear the bellicose medico smacking his lips in relish. It all recalls a passage from Job: “My desire is that mine enemy hath writ a book”.

But the icing on the cake of insolence goes to Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the feisty Central Bank Governor. Virtually dismissing Obasanjo as an economic illiterate, Sanusi, with caustic severity, added that the old war veteran may be a successful farmer but he is a bad economist. The main plank of Sanusi’s diatribe was that it was Obasanjo himself who had introduced mega-bill currencies into the Nigerian economy.

Yet in the very next breath, and in patent self-contradiction, Sanusi added that Obasanjo’s introduction of mega-bills did not lead to inflation due to “prudent fiscal and monetary policy”. Does that not mean that in spite of himself, Obasanjo is not a bad economist after all? In any case, the Central Bank guru has not told us how the current massive run on the naira through various sinister scams and the Sanusi-endorsed unjust taxation of the poor called subsidy removal will not eventuate in printing more and higher megawatts naira thus fuelling more tacit devaluation and inflation.

As it is often the case with Lamido Sanusi, the ease, fluency and facility of delivery seem to have got in the way of logic and deep reflection. In Nigerian officialdom it is not a crime to speak before thinking. Yet it is quite unlikely that these vitriolic denunciations could have passed without some tacit endorsement from the presidential bunker.

The elephant has the castle within its rifle sight. But the castle is unmoved and unmoving. It all points at a nasty roforofo fight or what the Yoruba call yanponyanrin. The old general may be trying to return to his old political base. But for once in his career, he might have made a fatal political miscalculation with Jonathan. This is because other unstable variables might have crept into the equation. The chap from Otueke is unlikely to go down lightly and meekly.

(First published in April, 2012)

December 29, 2013
The legend of Scheherazade

Scheherazade is a legendary Persian queen and the main storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights.The story goes that every day Shahryar (Persian: “king”) would marry a new virgin, and every day he would send yesterday’s wife to be beheaded. This was done in anger, having found out that his first wife was unfaithful to him. He had killed 1,000 such women by the time he was introduced to Scheherazade, the vizier’s daughter. [Scheherazade] had perused the books, annals and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples and instances of bygone men and things; indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred.

Against her father’s wishes, Scheherazade volunteered to spend one night with the king. Once in the king’s chambers, Scheherazade asked if she might bid one last farewell to her beloved sister, Dinazade, who had secretly been prepared to ask Scheherazade to tell a story during the long night. The king lay awake and listened with awe as Scheherazade told her first story. The night passed by, and Scheherazade stopped in the middle of the story. The king asked her to finish, but Scheherazade said there was not time, as dawn was breaking. So, the king spared her life for one day to finish the story the next night. So the next night, Scheherazade finished the story and then began a second, even more exciting tale which she again stopped halfway through at dawn. So the king again spared her life for one day to finish the second story.

And so the King kept Scheherazade alive day by day, as he eagerly anticipated the finishing of last night’s story. At the end of 1,001 nights, and 1,000 stories, Scheherazade told the king that she had no more tales to tell him. During these 1,001 nights, the king had fallen in love with Scheherazade, and had three sons with her. So, having been made a wiser and kinder man by Scheherazade and her tales, he spared her life. ( As culled from Wikipedia)Problems donating? | Other ways to give | Frequently asked questions | By donating, you are agreeing to our donor privacy policy. The Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization. By donating, you are agreeing to our donor privacy policy and to sharing your information with the Wikimedia Foundation and its service providers in the U.S. and elsewhere. *Monthly payments will be debited by the Wikimedia Foundation until you notify us to stop. We’ll send you an email receipt for each payment, which will include a link to easy cancellation instructions.

December 29, 2013